


The Sunnydale High Mortality Rate

by The_Eclectic_Bookworm



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, but. very heavily, the calendiles is implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 15:35:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9447776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Eclectic_Bookworm/pseuds/The_Eclectic_Bookworm
Summary: Jenny’s been in Sunnydale for maybe a year now, watching Angel, but she’s also had to watch so many colleagues and students disappear without a trace. Sometimes bodies show up, but a lot of the time they don’t, and all that’s left are empty chairs and a memo sent out that a substitute’s going to be needed.





	

**Author's Note:**

> technically i already posted this a few months back in my big collection of small giles/jenny fics, but i've always been meaning to continue it and i'm also kinda proud of it so i decided to pull it out and make it a standalone.

Good people don’t stay alive in this town. Jenny’s been in Sunnydale for maybe a year now, watching Angel, but she’s also had to watch so many colleagues and students disappear without a trace. Sometimes bodies show up, but a lot of the time they don’t, and all that’s left are empty chairs and a memo sent out that a substitute’s going to be needed. 

At first, she’s able to grit her teeth and push through it, because of  _course_ it’s awful but she’s not here to take care of these people, she’s here with a purpose. She’s here to observe, not to take action. But the thing is, though, Jenny’s the type of person who  _wants_ to take action, to help, even though she has no idea where to start.

She finds Dave’s body swinging from a rope in the classroom. That won’t come up in many stories, will it? All that’s going to come up in the faculty meeting is  _David Kirby was found dead in a classroom._ No one’s going to talk about  _Jenny Calendar locked herself in the girls’ bathroom after finding him,_ or  _Jenny Calendar thought maybe one good kid might make it out of this hell town but now he’s dead too,_ or  _please please please don’t let Willow be next please not her please she’s so good._

Jenny’s not crying. She did the first time a student died, and she hated it. Crying seems like a waste of time and energy, time spent being even more useless than she already is. Jenny wants to help, but her research isn’t telling her all that much.

Dave was a good kid. Dave wouldn’t have killed himself. Dave snickered when she made lame computer jokes in class, and Dave turned in his assignments on time, and Dave was tutoring Sara Jane Miller in chemistry and he  _promised_ he would keep his grades up for her sake. Jenny tries to get her breathing under control.

The truth is that not all of this is about Dave. Jenny’s becoming more and more scared as the months go by, because there’s every chance that she could be next. She has a cross, of course, keeps it in her purse, but there are other factors at play here. Murderers, maybe, who frame their crimes as suicides. She checked out the credentials of that Natalie French substitute a while back and, well, Natalie French seemed pretty well preserved for ninety, not to mention the bugs she was eating in the staff room. Jenny keeps on seeing weird things out of the corner of her eye, and she’s beginning to worry about what’s going to happen when the weird things take notice of  _her._

Jenny doesn’t want to die.

And it’s not like she can talk to anyone about this, because it’s not like anyone’s really going to understand what’s going on. She hasn’t made that many friends, anyway; most of her energy’s spent on watching Angel. She’s lonely and she wants to leave this town and go teach computer science somewhere else, where she can pretend the world is normal and fall in love with a cute guy or a pretty girl and feel safe for once in her life. 

But of course that’s not the kind of person she is.  

Shaking, Jenny exits the girls’ bathroom. This year in Sunnydale, she’s learned to perfect a poker face and a steady voice, and she knows that to the outside world she looks completely composed.  _Principal Snyder,_  she rehearses in her head,  _I found a dead body in my classroom. Principal Snyder, I found Dave Kirby’s body in my classroom. Principal Snyder—_

Dave was a good kid and now he’s a dead body in her classroom and  _why wasn’t she in the lab to stop it._ But did she really want to be in the lab to stop it because maybe she would have ended up like Dave and good people never stay alive in this town—

Jenny thinks her knees give way, because one moment she’s walking down the hallway and the next she’s sitting on the floor, back against the lockers. She chokes down a sob (not crying waste of time) and tries to remind herself that sitting in the middle of the hallway is very unprofessional, but she feels dizzy and frightened and unusually unable to pull herself together.

“Ms. Calendar?”

Jenny looks up, sees Daniel Osbourne (Oz, she thinks everyone calls him Oz) kneeling in front of her. Good kid. Probably gonna be dead by senior prom, given this town’s mortality rate. “Sorry,” she says, quite calmly for someone who’s sitting on the floor and having a very badly suppressed crisis over how everyone in this town who she cares about even a little always seems to die. She wants to say something like  _it’s been a long day,_ but she keeps on seeing Dave’s dead body swinging over the computers. It’s one thing when it’s happening in the shadows, but she  _works_ there. And Dave  _died_ there.

“Are you okay?” Oz asks carefully.

“I need to get up,” says Jenny, and finally manages to do so. It’s easier to pretend to be calm when there are people who are watching her. She can hold herself together for a short while, at least. “Thanks for checking, though,” she adds, a vague attempt at appreciation and gratefulness that she’s almost certain she isn’t able to pull off.

* * *

Good people don’t stay alive in this town. And that’s making Jenny more and more afraid every day.

Rupert (and hell, he doesn’t scoff when she calls him  _Rupert_ anymore; she’s starting to think she might have accidentally made a friend) catches her arm as she’s leaving the lunchtime faculty meeting, says something low and concerned about her looking a bit off-color and maybe she should sit down before class starts? Jenny can’t tell him that she stayed up late last night keeping tabs on an ensouled vampire, so she tells him that she didn’t get enough sleep, and suddenly she’s got a mug of black coffee and Rupert’s making a call to Principal Snyder and going on about “yes, I’m well aware that this is short notice, but the fact remains that Ms. Calendar is in no condition to teach class.”

Which, okay, maybe she hasn’t been getting enough sleep for a little longer than just last night. It’s been kind of accumulating. It’s hard to really sleep after finding a kid dead right next to your desk. Jenny threw herself into her espionage work involving Angel (if you can call sitting in a car with binoculars  _espionage_ ) and she hadn’t been expecting her work to suffer. Even if it did, she hadn’t been able to find it in herself to care, because half of the kids in her class would probably be dead in a few months, so what’s the  _point_ of trying to teach them anyway?

“I hate this town,” says Jenny, sitting down at the library table. Her voice is shaking. Rupert hangs up the phone, turning to look at her, and she hates the understanding look in his eyes. She wants to live in a place where he could turn around and say exasperatedly that  _I know it’s not exactly a metropolis, Ms. Calendar, but it does have its strong suits._ Although, to be fair, Rupert doesn’t really seem like the type to defend Sunnydale. 

She’s getting off topic.

Rupert walks over and sits down in the chair next to her. “I do too,” he says with a wry smile. 

And suddenly. Fuck. Suddenly Jenny can’t breathe because his smile makes her  _happy_ and that’s horrible, that’s awful, he could be next, he could be dead tomorrow morning, she could have to come in to the staff meeting and find out that he never showed up to work or that his car was found with bloodstains and scratch marks like Ms. Dougherty the physics teacher and he  _can’t die._

She wasn’t supposed to get attached. It was easier (shit that sounds so horrible; it wasn’t easier, she was just able to pretend it was) when she didn’t know the students that well. She was cool, and she didn’t make that many friends, and she couldn’t  _always_ remember students’ names but she was a good teacher. 

And now she cares about someone in this town. It’s almost a given that she’s going to lose him.

“Then get out,” Jenny says to Rupert. He’s looking at her strangely. She wonders what she looks like to him, right now. Probably a little maniacal. “Get out. Leave this town, if you hate it so much.” She imagines being able to know that  _someone_ made it out of Sunnydale. “Go to—to England, or wherever, just—leave.”

Rupert reaches out to her, awkwardly, and sort of squeezes her shoulder. Jenny gets the sense that he isn’t very accustomed to comforting people, but somehow she finds the fact that he’s trying comforting in itself. “I’m afraid I have obligations here,” he says, not sounding all that positively inclined toward said obligations, “and I’m sure you do as well.”

She does. “Yeah,” says Jenny heavily. Rupert’s hand doesn’t move from her shoulder, and she’s glad for that. 

It takes her a while to find it in herself to leave the library. Rupert offers to drive her home, and she takes him up on it. He plays classical music in the car and doesn’t say anything, but it’s a comfortable silence, which is surprising. Not exactly the kind of silence she and Rupert usually shared a few weeks back (angry, hostile, glaring-at-each-other-across-faculty-meetings silences), before Moloch and Dave and this whole mess. Jenny dozes off in the car. 

She wakes up in her bed; Rupert must have taken her keys from her purse, unlocked her house, and carried her indoors. When she checks for her keys, she finds them in her mailbox with a little note that says  _Get some rest—With regards, Snobby._

Jenny laughs, forgetting for a moment to be scared for him. He’s considerate, in an awkward way, and he keeps on giving her these shy, fluttery little smiles. She should be scared for someone so good, but when he somehow manages to make  _her_  feel safe for once, it’s hard to remember to be.


End file.
